Karen Joy Fowler

As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love, in a comedy of contemporary manners. By the author of Sarah Canary.

The Jane Austen Book Club

As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love.

It was a very average story and sometimes boring but I liked the conversations about Jane Austen books.

Shidehdeishidi

Colleen

I received The Jane Austen Book Club as a Christmas present. The premise sounding interesting, and I do love Jane Austen. However, I found this book to be boring and poorly written.

My biggest issue with this book is the point of view in which it is written. I will freely admit that I am tremendously persnickety when it comes to consistency in tense and point of view. This book starts in first person plural. Ok, I could have handled it. But after a few pages, I was disturbed to realize that specific narrator was ever designated. The "narrator" would say things like, "The six of us in the book club," and then the writing would proceed to list all six characters in THIRD PERSON! There is never any sense of who is telling the story. What is the point of using any kind of first person if you don't get any insight to the narrator's thoughts? 

So the narrative convulses along being recounted by some unspecified being. What, are the six members' consciousness's congealed into some conjoined group-think cognizance? Is the book club possessed by the spirit of Book Clubs Past?? It was absolutely maddening to read. But just about the time I reluctantly accepted this format, the narrative switched to third person. The chapters continued to switch back and forth between the two formats. Except that portions of Bernadette's chapter (only the flashbacks) were written in FIRST PERSON. That might lead one to believe that she is the main narrator, but no. She is mentioned in third person everywhere else. And there are snippets that point towards the other members of the group. Which leads me back to the belief that the narrator is some twisted amalgamation of six different people. If it was a possession, then it was the most banal, tedious possession in human history. 

This collective narrative was off-putting. It gave everything a brainwashed, Stepford Wives vibe. For example:
"We thought it was time for Allegra to be getting over Corinne. We thought how hard Sylvia was working to get over Daniel. We thought Allegra could learn something from that."
Ugh. What boring, overly-simplistic sentences! Another example not only of group-think, but also of events that the other members were never told about yet the collective somehow knew. (What are they Borgs or something??)
"After we'd gone, Grigg talked to Bianca about us, 'I think they like me. They do give me a hard time. They just found out tonight that I read science fiction. That didn't go over well.'"
Additionally:
"This was the third story we didn't hear. Grigg didn't tell it to us because we'd already gone home by the time he remembered it, and anyway none of us had read Stranger in a Strange Land and we were way to snotty about science fiction for him to criticize Heinlein in our chilly company."
Which brings me to my next point: these characters were all unpleasant snobs particularly towards the one male character. There are constant little digs against him like how they are scandalized that he served snacks on a Christmas tray at a summer gathering. But they are particularly snobby regarding Jane Austen. Now, I love Jane Austen. She is my all-time favorite author as she is to many other people. But the pretentious stand they take regarding her works is maddening. They are so self-righteous! I'm afraid that if anyone read this book without first reading Austen's works, they would probably deterred from every picking up one of her books. This is the opposite of what a homage should be.

The characters are all flat. And the little that you do find out about them is not endearing. None of these characters are likeable. When you combine that with the complete absence of character development, the result is a dull, off-putting story. The story spends more time flashing back to eat of the character's pasts, but these flashbacks do not really illuminate anything. They only raise more questions. The flashbacks don't tie into the present day story. Rather they are dumped randomly throughout the characters. Instead of encouraging me to like the characters, the more I learned about them, the more disgusted I was by them.

There was also an under thread of crudeness throughout the book. Vulgarity was thrown in at such random times and was at such odds with the prudish nature of the characters that the story seemed even more discordant. It felt like the author was trying to make the story edgier, but it had that trying-too-hard feel. Just like how the group was too strategically diverse - like a Disney show. 

There is no plot. A few things happen in the present day, but they are so sparsely noted and spaced apart that it was hard to care or be interested in them. As I mentioned, most of the story is random flashbacks with no context. (view spoiler)[The end is a rushed attempt to give each of the characters pathetic excuses for happy endings. Since this was not a romantic book, it just felt that this was thrown in to struggle to meet Jane Austen's hallmark of happy endings. Since none of these "relationships" were really developed during the story (and indeed some of them are only mentioned after the fact), they were practically laughable. 

The whole thing is a rather disgraceful abuse to Jane Austen's name. I doubt I will ever attempt to read anything else by this author. (hide spoiler)]

The book was okay. There wasn’t really anything that kept me hooked or anything. I was also confused upon who was narrating the story in the first place since it was told in first person? I would also get the side characters confused sometimes. But, I also liked how the characters would somewhat relate to Austen’s characters and all.

Gabriella Parker

Sarah Escorsa

This is a very average story... I was pretty much bored throughout the novel and found it very disapointing for two mains reasons: naively enough, I thought the book would hold many more references to Jane Austen's works when it focusses mainly on the lives of the people attending the book club (who are all very dull). The second reason is that the comments on the book cover are very misleading: "very funny", "I laughed out loud four or five times in the course of the introduction alone"... I obviously don't have the same sense of humour;)

abby donaldson

i had previously seen the film version of this book and absolutely loved it so i thought the book would go into more detail about the Jane Austen books. however, it is definitely more of a YA lighthearted, borderline romance, novel than a real engagement with Austen and her characters. i even made sure to read Mansfield Park before this so i could fully engage in their discussion but the actual ratio of their Austen book talk was slim compared to the endless background information on their lives. the structure of the book was interesting and the way the author interweaves the past and the present was very smooth and clever (felt like cinematography). overall, was hoping for more engagement with Austen but was a jovial novel.

Karen Harding

The Jane Austen Book Club follows the story of Bernadette, Prudie, Jocelyn, Allegra, Sylvia, and Grigg, as they work their way through each of Jane Austen’s novels across the year. Each month one of them leads a discussion on one of Austen’s novels, and we find their own stories wind in parallels to those of her characters.

Having read a lot of books recently that involve a deeply psychological plot lying underneath the actual plot, it was nice to have a breather with this book, which is a lovely Sunday afternoon type of read. The characters are recognisable and well drawn, with more depth into their pasts than you may have seen from the movie of the same name. I can see why they left some of the more horrific actions out of the movie, although they give a lot more clarity on reasoning for character actions, that you wouldn’t necessarily be a war of otherwise. 

Each of the characters had a nice clean end to them, and in Austen’s later style of writing, we see a very unexpected ending for Allegra, which harks so true to life, and reminded me of that line from ‘The Perks of being a Wallflower’, We accept the love we think we deserve.’

A moving, wise and delightfully modern comedy of manners from the bestselling, Man Booker shortlisted author Karen Joy Fowler. Six people - five women and a man - meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable - under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love... 'A thoroughly delightful comedy of contemporary manners' Entertainment Weekly Karen Joy Fowler is the Man Booker shortlisted, bestselling author of Sister Noon (a PEN/Faulkner prize finalist), Sarah Canary, The Sweetheart Season, The Jane Austen Book Club, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and the story collection Black Glass. She is a PEN/Faulkner Prize finalist and lives in Davis and Santa Cruz, California.

The Jane Austen Book Club

Reviews